Many warehouses, home improvement centers, lumberyards, retail stores, and other commercial enterprises have doors that should not be left open and unsupervised at any time. (The same can also be said of many residential doors.) These doors are used to permit ingress and egress, allowing various items or products to be removed as well as accepting delivery of new or returned items or products. However, unsupervised ingress and egress via such doors creates major problems. For example, unsupervised open access can create a hazardous and dangerous situation with the possibility of injury to an invitee, a customer, an employee or even to a trespasser. This type of situation has the potential for creating legal liability for the owner even if the owner was not at fault. In addition, unsupervised ingress and egress often leads to the theft of goods or merchandise (either outgoing or incoming). This is, in fact, a rampant problem in commercial settings, particularly when a door is left open and unattended. Substantial energy loss and theft cause hardship to the company in terms of direct financial loss. However, it also causes loss to customers due to the increases in pricing made to cover such losses.
There is, therefore, a need for assigned management supervision to be present while the door is open. Where this cannot be guaranteed, there is a distinct tendency for managerial personnel to leave a door to the supposed supervision of employees while handling other ongoing business matters. In order to eliminate this problem, it is necessary to find some way of requiring the presence of appropriate managerial personnel any time a door is open in order to (a) control and supervise goods or merchandise leaving or arriving at the open door and (b) to control and supervise people leaving or entering the premises at the open door.